Neil Gaiman
Neil Gaiman
Neil Richard MacKinnon Gaiman is an English author of short fiction, novels, comic books, graphic novels, audio theatre, and films. His notable works include the comic book series The Sandman and novels Stardust, American Gods, Coraline, and The Graveyard Book. He has won numerous awards, including the Hugo, Nebula, and Bram Stoker awards, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie medals. He is the first author to win both the Newbery and the Carnegie medals for the same work, The...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionNovelist
Date of Birth10 November 1960
CityPortchester, England
When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.
My stuff gets published in some countries as fiction and in some countries as fantasy. It's just where they think it will do best in the bookshops.
I started out writing much more science fictiony stuff and writing about science fiction.
You can't just boss bacteria around like that," said the younger Mrs. Hempstock. "They don't like it." "Stuff and silliness," said the old lady. "You leave wigglers alone and they'll be carrying on like anything. Show them who's boss and they can't do enough for you. You've tasted my cheese..
Be boring, knowing everything. You have to give all that stuff up if you're going to muck about here.
Genre fiction, as Terry Pratchett has pointed out, is a stew. You take stuff out of the pot, you put stuff back. The stew bubbles on.
I don't know much more than I did when I was alive. Most of the stuff I know now that I didn't know then I can't put into words.
The stuff you bring back from dreams is free.
Because if you don't stand up for the stuff you don't like, when they come for the stuff you do like, you've already lost.
I love mythic stuff. I love playing with gods, I love playing with myths. A lot of it has to do with that they're the basic places stories come from. They're the clay that you make the bricks out of.
When I started doing Sandman, I could look at a group of people lined up to get my autograph, and I knew who was my fan and who was somebody's mum there to get a signature. It doesn't work that way anymore. They're people. They're us. That's what they look like.
Fat Charlie wasn't sure that he liked freedom, ... There was too much open air involved.
You are time. Foul time, who steals the gold from a maiden's hair and takes the sapphire from a child's eyes. Dark time, who has stolen from every thing there ever was all the things that it held precious and divine... And left nothing but ashes and memories and the grave.
The best thing I think about me and Dave as a creative team is, we don't have to work together. We both have individual careers,